These are some of the things that have caught my atten­tion lately. It’s a more eclectic mix than just the news busi­ness, but then so’s life:

• The People Formerly Known as the Employ­ers | Deuzeblog — “For all the bril­liance of those advoc­at­ing a more demo­crat­ive media sys­tem, there is gen­er­ally noth­ing in their ana­lysis that acknow­ledges this erosion of power, this whole­sale redis­tri­bu­tion of agency away from those who tend to crave only one thing: cre­at­ive and edit­or­ial autonomy. No mat­ter how excited I can get about user-generated con­tent and the col­lect­ive intel­li­gence of cyber­space, this power shift erodes the very found­a­tion of the way we know (and thus inter­act with) the world, and our abil­ity to truly func­tion in it autonom­ously, and on our own terms.”
• Voo­doo news­pa­per eco­nom­ics | Reflec­tions of a News­o­saur — “Accept­ing the premise that you could save 60% in expenses by abandon­ing print, here is how this would play out for a pro­to­typ­ical pub­lish­ing com­pany with $100 mil­lion in total rev­en­ues and a 15% oper­at­ing profit:

  If the com­pany aban­doned print but were able to double its online sales to $20 mil­lion, it would lose $14 mil­lion in a year, for an oper­at­ing mar­gin of a neg­at­ive 70%. To break even, the pro­to­typ­ical pub­lic­a­tion would have to more than triple its sales from the cur­rent levels. To make a profit of 15%, the com­pany would have to quad­ruple it sales.”

• New Mon­et­ar­ism by David Roche and Bob McKee — The book we all — per­haps — should have been read­ing before our asset price bubble burst…
• New York Times Run­ning On Fumes | Henry Blod­get — “[T]he New York Times (NYT) is approach­ing the point where it will have to man­age its busi­ness primar­ily to con­serve cash and avoid default­ing on its debt. This situ­ation will only get worse as advert­ising rev­enue con­tin­ues to fall, and it will be very ser­i­ous by early next year.”
• Pay­ing Court to Rupert Mur­doch | Peter Wilby — The Mur­doch papacy: “Pay­ing court to Mur­doch has become a rite of pas­sage for Brit­ish oppos­i­tion lead­ers, as though this inter­na­tional media mogul were some kind of mon­arch. It is often said that the influ­ence of news­pa­pers is declin­ing. Fewer people buy them and, in any case, it is doubt­ful that any­body votes for a par­tic­u­lar party because the press advises them to. But in Bri­tain par­tic­u­larly – where there is no equi­val­ent of the Murdoch-owned Fox News in the US or the “shock jock” radio sta­tions – news­pa­pers still set the agenda and determ­ine the tone of polit­ical debate. When it comes to angling the news, the UK press still has a mono­poly. Politi­cians live in ter­ror of upset­ting the highest cir­cu­la­tion mass mar­ket papers, Murdoch’s Sun and the Daily Mail.”
• Nielsen: This Is Your Brain On Advert­ising | Media Post — “In a study released Thursday, Google and MediaVest used Neuro­Fo­cus find­ings to show that over­lay ads appear­ing in You­Tube videos grab con­sumers’ atten­tion and boost brand awareness.

  YouTube-owner Google has cham­pioned over­lay ads–which appear in the lower third of video screens–as a less intrus­ive altern­at­ive to pre-roll ads. But the format has failed to gain much trac­tion with advert­isers, and earlier this month Google announced it would begin run­ning pre-, mid– and post-roll ads with the launch of full-length videos on YouTube.

  With rev­enue from You­Tube ads fall­ing short of com­pany expect­a­tions at an estim­ated $200 mil­lion this year — mostly from dis­play ads — the pres­sure grows to find new ways to mon­et­ize the Web’s largest video site.”